Researchers figured out the best way to cut pizza

Via Flickr
You've probably never given cutting a pizza much thought besides the fact that it is something you need to do before you can shove it into your face hole.

Some mathematicians, on the other hand, view the act of cutting a pizza as a geometric dance, a living embodiment of an equation that you can eat afterwards, which is exactly why two researchers from the University of Liverpool have recently published a study about how to cut pizza evenly in weird and overly complicated shapes.

The study, entitled Infinite Families of Monohedral Disk Tilings, explores one question, according to Phys.Org, which the researchers put as: "Can we construct monohedral tilings of the disk such that a neighbourhood of the origin has trivial intersection with at least one tile?"

If that sounds ultra confusing, it's because it's phrased in the most complicated way a person could ever phrase a sentence. Basically, in normal people speak, the team is looking for a way to evenly cut up a circle that doesn't have one intersection in the middle.

To make this topic interesting to everyone with taste buds, the team decided to focus on how to pull it off with a pizza. Since pizza is normally cut in half a bunch of times leaving one intersection of cuts in the middle and results in equal, triangular pieces like the image above, it's actually the perfect medium to explore different forms of "disk tiling."

As you can see, the pizza is now equally cut into curvy "shields" of equal area that has many more intersections than a traditional cut.

However, cutting that crazy design with a dull pizza cutter (they're always dull) seems like an exercise in frustration that would ruin your dinner.

To pull it off, you cut three curved pieces across the pie. Then, you simply divide the sections in two, which sounds simple but would probably cause a profanity-filled outburst if tried in a group setting.

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The real question is what the findings will help us solve on a practical level. After all, the old way of cutting pizza has worked just fine. Most of the time, discoveries like this help us in other aspects of life by solving some small problem that was halting a larger innovation.

This, apparently, isn't the case here because one of the two researchers, Joel Anthony Haddley, told New Scientist: "I've no idea whether there are any applications at all to our work outside of pizza-cutting." So there you have it, just a new way to cut a pizza.

You can read more about the new study in greater detail over at Phys.Org.